Brace Yourselves

The one and only church left in Jerusalem was burning. Towering flames lit the sky and illuminated crowds of people in the street. Most were celebrating the inferno. I walked into a nearby museum and into its massive marble floored lobby. Dozens of cameras mounted on the walls snapped photos of me from every angle, checking to see if I was a terrorist. Luckily, I was not.

I passed through the museum and out the back to a large, mostly vacant airfield. My favorite professor was giving a lecture on warfare and today the class was being held inside a Learjet parked out on the airstrip. Kevin, Lucas, and Melissa were attending the class with me. We filed into the jet and I made my way through the small group of other students to take a seat in the back, buckling myself into the leather chair. I could see a small river flowing by the airfield outside my window.

We watched with growing concern as the banks overflowed and water started flooding into the airfield and under our plane.

The professor stood at the front of the jet but hadn’t started his lecture yet. Not many of the students seemed interested anyway, as they were all talking about the dam upstream on the  river. A large flow of water was scheduled to be released down the river and was predicted to flood a local baseball field. We all though that was a terrible idea, as it would probably ruin the game scheduled to be played that night. As if on cue, the river began to rise and was soon flooding much more severely than we had predicted. We watched with growing concern as the banks overflowed and water started flooding into the airfield and under our plane.

It became apparent that the water wasn’t going to carry us away, so we kept calm. That calm was soon sundered as one of the students pointed out the window. “Oh no, the dam!” The river’s water level surged and headed straight for the airfield.  The current swept under the jet and began to carry it away. I reacted quickly, rushing to the front of the jet and shutting the door just as it was about to be inundated. The jet bobbed up and down in the water as we headed down what was now a massive river. A light sprinkle of rain started, quickly turning into a constant downpour. Waves began to grow larger with each passing moment.

Lucas decided this was a perfect time to start messing around and jump up and down on the plane, seeing if he could get it to flip over. “Stop being stupid and fucking around,” I yelled at him. “You’re going to make us tip over and drown!”

The jet bobbed up and down in the water as we headed down what was now a massive river.

The flood current turned and we started heading straight for a giant air hanger on the edge of the field. Tower walls of water rose before the jet, dwarfing our makeshift boat. I grabbed the controls and somehow managed to force the jet around to hit the waves head on. It was our only chance to prevent capsizing. A tall chain link fence stuck out of the water in front of us and I called out to the rest of those on board.

“Brace yourselves!”

“Brace yourselves!” The plane plowed through the fence without even a jostle.

“Did you just say brace yourselves?” Melissa asked incredulously. She thought it was a truly ridiculous thing to say.

“Yeah, yeah,” I replied. I decided to embrace it and took it to the next level, shouting out like a pirate. “All right me ‘arties! This be it! This storm be rougher’n your mother’s arse!”

Everyone laughed.

Note: Hey, only 4 months between posts this time. Progress. I’ve got tons of dreams recorded in a backlog, it’s just a measure of typing them up.

 

 

 

Out of the Frying Pan

The whining, rumbling echoes of several motorcycles rebounded off the cavern walls around me.  I was in a mine shaft, cold and dark except for small pools of light spilling from lanterns sporadically spaced along the walls.  The biker gang had been chasing me for what seemed like hours, and they were catching up.  With no choice left, I stood to the side and hid behind a wooden support column.

The sound of a throttled engine grew louder from down the tunnel, and I crouched in anticipation.  As the biker came into view around a corner I leaped, thrusting my foot out in a vicious ninja kick that launched him from his seat and into the wall with a crunch.  Barely pausing as I landed, I picked up the bike and jumped on, twisting the accelerator hard for more speed.  The rest of the gang was in close pursuit.

Lanterns on the tunnel walls blurred past as I accelerated to extreme speed.  The motorcycle began to shake violently.  The wheels suddenly flew off and the handlebars came apart in my hands.  I cringed, awaiting the brutal crash, but it didn’t come.  I continued flying down the dark tunnels, the now silent and dead engine the only thing beneath me.  I realized I didn’t need the motorcycle at all, I could fly!  The  concentration required to stay aloft was intense.

There were no more lanterns now, but I could still barely make out my course through the mostly straight tunnel via the glowing veins of amethyst minerals in the walls. Soon I caught a faint glimpse of daylight ahead.  The tunnel was ending.  As I blasted out of the end of the tunnel, I rescued an old friend sitting stranded on the mountainside.  She clung to my feet and we flew off, now at a much slower pace with the added passenger.

With a jolt of inspiration, I realized I could collect water from clouds around myself, forming a water bullet that propelled me at super speeds.  My friend and I could still breathe easily in the water, and we used my new water bullet flying technique to scream over the countryside at supersonic velocity.

In short time I was flying over the ocean alongside an African port.  I skimmed just above the water and reveled in the exhilaration.  I whipped up over a large cargo ship, its deck covered in many different colored containers.  Descending once more to fly just above the water’s surface I noticed some large fishing nets in the water. Seabirds took to the air as we approached. With growing concern I watched the birds begin to lift the nets out of the water directly in our path.

There was no way to avoid the nets, and they enveloped us as we flew into them.  My friend somehow managed to escape their grasp, but my hands became knotted in tough nylon strands and I was dragged down into the water.  A nearby fishing boat began hauling in the nets.

We were caught.  These weren’t fishermen, they were pirates, and they were intent on chopping up our body parts for sale on the black market. They hauled me into the boat and looked down at me with malevolence.  I lay huddled, soaking wet with a hole in my shirt. They thought I was poor.

At this point the dream inexplicably changed to third person, with me observing everything like it was a movie.  I was no longer “me”.  Instead a late teens/early-20′s kid replaced me.

The pirate captain raised his machete and asked one of his several prisoners who would be missed the most.  Snatching the young man’s arm, the corsair slammed him up against a shipping container. Whatever answer to the pirate’s query that may have been coming was interrupted by the violent descent of the machete into the cringing man’s head. A fountain of blood cascaded down the victim’s face, nearly as terrifying as the scream that issued from his lips. The captain savagely ripped the machete back out and struck again.

Instead of spraying yet more blood from a grievous wound, the kid’s head began to turn black as soot. What had so recently been a smug look on the captain’s face turned to one of utter confusion. The kid no longer screamed, but seethed with anger. He grabbed the pirate’s wrist and squeezed. Acrid smoke curled up where the fingers grasped and before the captain could speak his skin was graying to ash and flaking away.  Without a sound, the captain’s charred body collapsed to the ground.

Now fully healed of the machete wound, the enraged youth calmly walked from one shocked captor to another, briefly touching them. With each  touch a pirate burst into flame and was reduced to ash. Buildings joined in the inferno and struggled to reach a heat as intense as the young man’s rage. Turning, the kid noticed a battalion of soldiers drilling on a parade ground beyond a nearby chain link fence. Their feet struck the pavement in perfect unison as they marched, clapping hands to rifles.

The fury boiling within the man reached a point beyond heat. It chilled with a cold to freeze magma. A raging blizzard picked up around him and somewhere in a distant corner of his mind he realized the very weather was his to command.

He extended his arms to the sky and black roiling clouds simply appeared. With a violent thrust of his hand, columns of lightning erupted from the heavens, plummeting down into the soldiers. White hot death split the air as thunder threatened to crush everything near. When the lightning finally cleared nothing remained of the soldiers, only a scorched patch of barren earth.

His revenge sated, the young man lowered his arms. “This is a fishing town, they should have no problem,” he said.

And with a blast of wind he took to the skies.

Just a Drill

I hadn’t been at the football training camp long, but I was excited to attend one run by such a famous coach.  I ran the shuttle drill for Coach, doing my best to improve each time.  After one such run I rested on my haunches to catch my breath.  On the ground before me was a large three-ring binder.  Curious, I picked it up.  Inside was an exhaustive sampling of every math test and paper I’d ever turned in during the 6th grade, all written on thick construction paper.  It also held a log detailing all my shuttle times I ran back then, including my personal best of 5.2 seconds.

I waved the binder at Coach.  ”Hey, I wonder if I can beat my best time.”

While I waited for my next shot at the drill, a yellow lab came trotting up to me.  It was Vegas, my much beloved dog I had cherished from puppy-hood to her death a few years ago.  Seeing her back alive and well brought tears of joy streaming from my eyes.  I hugged her close, hugged her tighter.

I woke up sobbing, with an empty hole in my chest, because I knew it was just a dream.